There is, besides the grace of style, another cause why the ancient poets chose to write in measured language; which is this. Their poems were made at first with intention to have them sung, as well epic as dramatic (which custom hath been long time laid aside, but began to be revived in part, of late years, in Italy,) and could not be made commensurable to the voice or instruments, in prose; the ways and motions whereof are so uncertain and undistinguished, like the way and motion of a ship in the sea, as not only to discompose the best composers, but also to disappoint sometimes the most attentive reader, and put him to hunt counter for the sense. It was therefore necessary for poets in those times to write in verse. The verse which the Greeks and Latins, considering the nature of their own languages, found by experience most grave, and for an epic poem most decent, was their _hexameter_; a verse limited not only in the length of the line, but also in the quantity of the syllables. Instead of which we use the line of ten syllables, recompensing the neglect of their quantity with the diligence of rhyme. And this measure is so proper to an heroic poem, as without some loss of gravity or dignity, it was never changed. A longer is not far from ill prose; and a shorter, is a kind of whisking, you know, like the unlacing, rather than the singing of a muse. In an epigram or a sonnet, a man may vary his measures, and seek glory from a needless difficulty; as he that contrived verses into the forms of an organ, a hatchet, an egg, an altar, and a pair of wings; but in so great and noble a work as is an epic poem, for a man to obstruct his own way with unprofitable difficulties, is great imprudence. So likewise to choose a needless and difficult correspondence of rhyme, is but a difficult toy, and forces a man sometimes, for the stopping of a chink, to say somewhat he did never think. I cannot therefore but very much approve your _stanza_, wherein the syllables in every verse are ten, and the rhyme alternate. For the choice of your subject you have sufficiently justified yourself in your preface. But because I have observed in Virgil, that the honour done to Æneas and his companions, has so bright a reflection upon Augustus Cæsar, and other great Romans of that time, as a man may suspect him not constantly possessed with the noble spirit of those his heroes; and I believe you are not acquainted with any great man of the race of Gondibert, I add to your justification the purity of your purpose, in having no other motive of your labour, but to adorn virtue, and procure her lovers; than which there cannot be a worthier design, and more becoming noble poesy.